Leicester jihadist killed in RAF drone strike

Ruhul Amin, a British citizen fighting for Islamic State, was killed in an RAF drone attack in Syria. Amin appeared in an Isis propaganda video titled There Is No Life Without Jihad in June last year under the name Brother Abu Bara al Hindi. Picture: YouTube/PA Wire

A friend of a British Islamic State fighter killed in an RAF drone strike has said he feels no sympathy for the dead man.

Ruhul Amin, who is Scottish born but moved to Leicester with his family, was killed in the attack on a vehicle in which another British citizen, Reyaad Khan, was travelling.

He had not been specifically targeted in the military action.

The strike against Khan was carried out without parliamentary authority on August 21 and was the first occasion in modern times that the UK has used military force in a country where it was not engaged in a war, Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons.

Three days later, a second Briton believed to have been involved in plots against the UK, Junaid Hussain, was killed in a US air strike.

Amin, 26, was born in Bangladesh and grew up in Aberdeen before moving with his family to Leicester.

Stephen Marvin, a long time Aberdonian school friend of Amin, told ITV News he could not sympathise with him.

He said: “I feel sympathy for his family of course. It’s not their fault at all but it’s hard to say he didn’t get what he deserved in the end. He was my childhood best friend but he was a totally different person in the last 12 to 18 months so it was hard to sympathise with him, personally.

“I feel sadness for his family. They didn’t ask for any of this. They couldn’t have stopped it in any way. For him, I can’t have any sympathy for him. Evidently he’s chosen to go there and that’s his decision.”

Mr Marvin said Amin was radicalised in Birmingham.

He told the channel: “He said he met people in Birmingham and he was spoken to there and offered to go to Syria under the promise he was allowed to leave whenever he wanted to. He went over and spent three months in a Koran-type camp that gets you into their type of thinking around the Koran. Then he went on to three months military camp after that.

“The first time I phoned I heard a gunshot in the background. He said it was rebel fighters. He was sitting on a riverbank. He told me when he was speaking. I asked him, ‘aren’t you scared of getting shot?’ He said, if he dies, he’ll be with Allah.

“That kind of shocked me. You’re not used to hearing - especially in Aberdeen - you’re not used to hearing your friends talk like that. He had no fear whatsoever of death. He was confident he was going to a better place.”

Amin featured alongside Khan in the 13-minute IS recruitment video entitled There is No Life Without Jihad under the name Brother Abu Bara al Hindi.

Wearing sunglasses and a white headscarf, he could be heard saying: “Are you willing to sacrifice the fat job you’ve got, the big car, the family you have?

“Are you willing to sacrifice this, for the sake of Allah? If you do Allah will give you back 700 times more.”

In July 2014 he boasted on ITV’s Good Morning Britain that he had been “involved in a few combats” in Syria.

Explaining the moment he left Britain, he said: “I left the house with the intention of not to go back. I’m going to stay and fight until the (caliphate) is established, or I die.”